still admire it, does it wholly
satisfy us? Is there not as much room as ever for an edition that shall
express primarily not the absurdity of its subject-matter, but the
delicate playfulness of Irving's humor and the lightness and grace of
his exuberant style? Has there ever been a final "Don Quixote"?
Certainly not in the recent monumental editions with their quagmire of
footnotes. Moreover, if _we_ had a final edition of the great romance it
would not remain final for our children's children. Every age will make
its own interpretations of the classics and will demand that they be
embodied in contemporary design. Thus every age in its book design
mirrors itself for future admiration or contempt.

Obviously, in giving form to a single work a designer is freer than in
handling a series by one or by various authors. In such cases he must
seize upon more general and therefore less salient characteristics. The
designer of "Hiawatha" or "Evangeline" has a fairly clear task before
him, with a chance of distinct success or failure; but the designer of
an appropriate form for the whole series of Longfellow's works, both
prose and poetry, has a less individualized problem, and must think of
the elements that run through all,--sweetness, grace, gentleness,
dignity, learning. Yet, though general, these qualities in a series may
be far from vague. We have only to consider the absurdity of a
handy-volume Gibbon or a folio Lamb. On looking at the bulky,
large-type, black-covered volumes of the Forman edition of Shelley and
Keats one instinctively asks, "What crime did these poets commit that
they should be so impounded?" The original edition of the life of
Tennyson by his son, in two lumbering, royal octavo volumes, comes near
to what Thackeray called the Farnese Hercules, "a hulking abortion."
Contrast with it the dignity linked with charm of the original edition
of Longfellow's life by his brother. But of all monstrosities of book
design the British three-volume novel mania is responsible for some of
the worst. Henry Ward Beecher's one novel, "Norwood," which appeared in
America becomingly clad in a single volume, received in England the
regulation three-volume dress, in which it looks as ridiculously
inflated as did a slender miss of that period in the crinoline then in
vogue. There is one abomination in book design for which I owe a
personal grudge to commercialism, and that is the dropsical book form
given to Locker-Lampson's